Miniaturized decoupled slotted patch RFID tag antennas for wearable health care

In this article, a couple of two-layered RFID tag antenna designs exhibiting improved performance descriptors for on-body applications are presented. The antennas are designed to operate in the microwave band (2.4–2.48 GHz) ensuring high data transmission rates ideal for real-time subject monitoring applications. The radiating element of both the antennas is a slotted patch structure provisioned with a pair of T-shaped slots realized on a commercial FR4 substrate. The augmentation of a systematic sequence of narrow comb-like etchings into the design enhances the impedance bandwidth considerably. A high permittivity silicon layer embedded with the radiating patch provides resilience from the human body dielectric losses. A modified antenna design utilizing patch miniaturization technique, resulting in an overall footprint reduction by 32%, is also proposed. The designed tag antennas offer a gain of more than 1.8 dBi and an attractive read range greater than 6.8 m in the operating band.